In commercial production, particularly of consumer products, machines for manufacturing the products operate at very high speeds and rapidly delivery enormous quantities of finished products. These products then must be separated into counted groups and packaged. Often the apparatus for grouping and packaging is unable to handle products as rapidly as they are produced. Therefore, it is often necessary to divide the output from a single machine into several lines for counting and packaging, requiring expensive duplication of equipment. Therefore, it is desirable that the conveying system handle all the output with a single loading place and unloading site for delivery to a packaging machine such as a bagger or cartoner. However, apart from the problems above, another difficulty is that the manufactured products are produced one at a time at a constant speed, whereas typical packaging machines require counted groups of products suitable for packaging. Therefore, the conveyor system should be able to gather single products continuously but be able to unload groups of the gathered products at varying speed.
In the manufacture of feminine care pads, the pads are commonly wrapped in individual polymer film wrappings, and then wrapped pads are commonly packaged in polymer bags or cartons. For efficient packaging and shipping, the products need to be compressed. Thus, an additional complication is that the pads generally need to be compressed after removal from the individual packaging machine and before being placed in consumer package. Therefore, such a conveyor system should be able to receive the individually wrapped napkins one at a time, unload them in groups for packaging, and compress the groups of individual packages by a satisfactory amount for placement into the consumer package. Other feminine care products, such as wrapped tampons and unwrapped pads, do not require compression but do require high-speed handling, counting and packaging.
Prior conveying systems have not been required to meet all these needs and additionally operate at a high speed.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,768,642 issued to Stefan A. Hunter and assigned to the present assignee discloses an apparatus with two conveyor belts carrying material handling devices. For at least a portion of their travel, the handling devices travel in the same track or path, although they are attached to separate conveyor belts that travel parallel with each other. This apparatus cannot handle product at ultra-high rates, provides only horizontal groups for use with a bagger and has a relatively narrow angle at which it can accept product.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,577,453 issued to Henry H. Hofeler discloses an apparatus which forms and compresses multi-stack arrays of compressible, generally flat articles on a receiving platform. This apparatus discloses only vertical stacking suitable for cartons. Now, a conveyor system and method have been developed which can form vertical stacks or horizontal groups of products and can accept product from a variety of angles at ultra-high speed.